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Updated: Mar 28, 2026

P50 Sensory Gating in Infants
Published on: December 26, 2013
Cognitive mechanisms associated with auditory sensory gating
L A Jones1, P J Hills2, K M Dick3
1Department of Neuroscience, Physiology, and Pharmacology, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK.
Abstract:
Sensory gating is a neurophysiological measure of inhibition that is characterised by a reduction in the P50 event-related potential to a repeated identical stimulus. The objective of this work was to determine the cognitive mechanisms that relate to the neurological phenomenon of auditory sensory gating. Sixty participants underwent a battery of 10 cognitive tasks, including qualitatively different measures of attentional inhibition, working memory, and fluid intelligence. Participants additionally completed a paired-stimulus paradigm as a measure of auditory sensory gating. A correlational analysis revealed that several tasks correlated significantly with sensory gating. However once fluid intelligence and working memory were accounted for, only a measure of latent inhibition and accuracy scores on the continuous performance task showed significant sensitivity to sensory gating. We conclude that sensory gating reflects the identification of goal-irrelevant information at the encoding (input) stage and the subsequent ability to selectively attend to goal-relevant information based on that previous identification.
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